Litterbug, Litterbug, shame on you!

Look at the terrible things you do!

 

Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.

I have littered.

The other day I was going hiking with my friend, Bonita, and picked up a bottle of Snapple on the way. The trail was long, steep and rocky, tricky footing most of the way. Up top, I sat down to enjoy some richly-deserved refreshment, and set the Snapple bottle down on what I thought was a nice, even surface. Unfortunately, the surface was neither nice nor even, and the glass bottle fell over and broke. It was a pain, but not a big one, and I carefully picked up the pieces and headed into the trees.

Bonita says “Where are you going?”

I say “To get rid of this glass.”

She says “You’re not going to just dump it in the woods, are you?” It wasn’t really a question, Father.

I say “What do you expect me to do with it?”
“Carry it out,” she says. “You can’t leave it here.”

I say “Well, I’m gonna bury it. In the middle of nowhere. It’ll never turn up again, I guarantee it.”

She says “I can’t believe you’re even considering it.”

I could see Bonita was walking on the edge of violence, and very carefully tried to explain my reasoning.

I say “I guess I shouldn’t have brought a glass bottle, but I did, and now I know better. But if you think I’m going to head back down that lousy trail with a thin nylon day-pack full of razor-sharp glass shards slung on my back, you’re very much mistaken. One slip and I could have a bigger problem than defiling Mother Nature.”

Bonita says “What if a squirrel, or a bird, gets into it? It could kill them!”

My position, Vicar, was that if some chipmunk is stupid enough to eat broken glass, then that would make me a positive agent of Natural Selection.

Ooooh…I’m gonna pay for that one, aren’t I? You do know it was just a figure of speech, and not an endorsement of evolutionary theory, right?

Anyway, I wasn’t about to head down with a pack full of broken glass, and Bonita wasn’t about to let me bury it in the woods, and I was starting to think that one of us wasn’t going to leave that mountaintop alive when Bonita remembered seeing the disintegrating hulk of an old, lidless metal box rusting its way into oblivion a few feet off the trail only a couple hundred yards from where we stood arguing. Sometime, probably years ago, somebody had dropped a pop can into the box, which in Bonita’s mind, apparently, qualified the box as an approved trash receptacle. With her not-too-enthusiastic blessing, I deposited the glass in the box, where it will remain perfectly intact, visible to hikers, and easily accessible to stupid woodland creatures for ages to come. But then, putting the broken glass in the box was never really about doing the best thing under the circumstances, it was about satisfying the modern anti-littering lobby’s manic compulsion to put-it-somewhere.

 

Please understand, Padre, that I don’t like litter any better than any other right-thinking person. You might say I was raised in the Faith – pick up your toys, put away your clothes, throw away your trash. For much of my life, not littering has been more habit than conscious choice.

I guess the first time I gave any real thought to littering was as a young man, when I was fortunate to travel abroad and spend time in foreign parts where folks discard their unwanted surplus with almost child-like spontaneity, and without a hint of public condemnation. I have seen otherwise picturesque streets and plazas virtually buried in trash, and I can tell you it’s a pretty grim picture. Wading through seas of wadded-up newspapers, candy wrappers and plastic beverage containers, I’ve been astonished to wash up against government donation kiosks, drifts of rubbish almost obscuring signs pleading for contributions to help fight the nation’s chronic littering problem.

Was I wrong, Father, not to make a donation? I mean, if Jacomo and Jocasta Q. Publico can’t be bothered to drop their empty Pellegrino bottle in a trash can, I doubt my humble piaster will buy their cooperation.

Forgive me my digression, Father. I only mean that having seen first-hand how rampant littering degrades the common landscape, I had discovered, for the first time in my life, a rational reason to not litter. On the other hand, I also saw for the first time that not everybody considers the offhand scattering of rubbish a crime against civilization, a symptom of moral dissipation, or a brutal rape of Gaea. I guess you could say my general stance on litter, while personally unchanged, was still evolving.

After all, littering is what humans do. From coprolites scattered about an African cave, to llama bones moldering on the Pampas, to shell middens heaped along the Chesapeake, to lakes of stone-chips surrounding the pyramids, to fume-choked Newcastle awash in coal slag, creating waste is nothing more or less than the genetically inevitable byproduct of all human activity. It’s in our DNA. Altering and manipulating the natural world is Mankind’s principle survival mechanism, and both of those processes necessarily generate trash.

I can see you multiplying Hail Marys in your head, Father, but hear me out. 

It’s been my observation that just as humanity’s endless ingenuity produces no end of garbage, its inventive nature and native opportunism never stops finding new and better ways to deal with the mess. More than 90 percent of this country’s industrial waste winds up getting used again, and again, and again, for crying out loud!

Sorry for the outburst, Your Worship, but in this highly complex and diversified economy, one person’s dross is almost always somebody else’s raw material, and it’s cheaper to buy pavement-extender, or fuel, or compost, from a guy who’s got boxcar-loads of it sitting in his back lot than to make it yourself from scratch.

Littering, littering every place,

My, what a disgrace!

 

You make a good point, Father.

No, I’m not really an industry, and not really in the market for worn-out tires, but I’m equally impressed with our culture’s methods for handling non-industrial waste. Most people in this country – except maybe you, Padre – crank out about four pounds of solid waste every day. Subtract for curbside recycling, backyard composting, garage sale-ing and re-gifting, and that still comes to something like 250 million tons of public nuisance every year. Yeah, that is a lot of boxcars, Father, about 3.7 million of them, just in case you were curious, and all that trash winds up attracting crows and coyotes at one of the nation’s 3,091 clean, safe, efficient, and virtually inexhaustible landfills.

Why the disapproving cluck, Padre? That’s a good thing! If you want to know the truth, the miracle of modern trash collection is the real reason I’ve mostly sworn off littering. Let me explain.

To my way of thinking, littering is just the most public manifestation of laziness, or “sloth”, in your professional lingo. Face it, these days you’re rarely more than a few steps from a designated trash receptacle. They’re everywhere, from the mall to the park to the city sidewalks. And if you don’t happen to be next to a trash can at a particular moment, you will be the next time you stop for gas, or groceries, or a crunchy Gordita. And there’s no shame in dumping that Gordita wrapper on the floor in the back seat of your car until you get home, because how many wastebaskets are in your own house? Seriously, Father! How many do you have in the rectory? Oh. I would have guessed more than that. But of course you must be a very tidy person. Cleanliness is next to Godliness, right?

And honestly – in the unlikely event that somebody finds themselves on foot and miles from the nearest garbage bin, what could they possibly have to throw away that won’t fit into their pocket or purse? If they carried it into the wilderness, they can certainly carry it back out again, provided it isn’t bristling with pointy death, or on fire. These days there’s just not much excuse for not dumping your junk in proper fashion, because the responsible disposal of trash has become ridiculously easy and convenient.

Magical, really.

Where is that 250 million tons of trash? You don’t see it. You can’t smell it. It’s just…gone. Properly disposed of, every gum wrapper, every shampoo bottle, every orange peel, every Snapple bottle, simply disappears. That’s because a huge and largely unnoticed army of men and women – taxpaying, family-raising, society-contributing men and women – do nothing for 40 hours a week besides taking care of your four-pound problem. The cigarette butt is whisked away by night; the empty Tender Vittles tins vanish while you’re at your desk; if you don’t have an ant problem, it’s not because you’re some kind of domestic genius, it’s because those well-gnawed hot wings were long gone before the ants got wind of them. And that vast organization, operating 24 hours a day, out of sight and out of mind, is our society’s smooth-running answer to the 500 million cubic yards of garbage we create every year, a volume that works out to something like 5,300 Nimitz Class aircraft carriers no longer harshing our buzz, or 2.3 million Boeing 747s we don’t have to step over to get to the lawn mower, or 314 Saint Peter’s Basilicas stuffed to the rafters with carry-out boxes and soggy coffee filters.

Yes, I thought you’d like that, Vicar.

Okay, okay, I know other sinners are waiting, but here’s the thing – I don’t like litter for the same reason I don’t like vandalism. Something, anything, however humble or mundane, if maintained in its manufactured state is capable of performing its intended function, and is thus a net asset to the world. Break it, and it becomes a problem requiring effort and, probably, money, to be dealt with. The window in the abandoned house is, at very worst, a neutral object that may yet be salvaged to someone’s gain. Throw a rock through it, and it instantly loses any possible value and becomes a hazard to human navigation.

Likewise, the Snapple bottle thrown into the bushes, or the parking lot, or the street, becomes an obstacle to the smooth flow of human intercourse, and an affront to enlightened society. Properly disposed of in a trash can, it becomes part and parcel of that smooth flow, a sterling example of modern enlightenment, a symbol of all that Man can accomplish.

Do you see what I’m getting at, Padre? Simply by not littering, we can all participate directly in what may well be the single greatest achievement in the history of civilization – the American waste disposal system. And, to me, that’s worth the effort.

Abso-what-now?

Absolution! Right! I’m getting to that, Father. I thought priests were supposed to be patient.

Rusty box or no, I definitely littered, and in this day, and in this locality, I know very well that’s a serious moral transgression. And as long as I’m unburdening my soul, you may as well know that one time I drove off with a small stack semi-worthless pamphlets sitting on the roof of my car, which predictably blew off somewhere between Golden and Boulder, and I didn’t go back to find them and dispose of them properly.

It didn’t even cross my mind.

Whew. That felt good.

Does it count that I’ve never littered with malice aforethought? It should, because on those rare occasions that I have abandoned manufactured waste upon the land, I did so with only charity in my heart.

Maybe the devil made me do it, but I’d prefer to think I acted in the best Christian tradition by not risking my own well-being to comply with an irrational zero-tolerance littering policy, nor wasting my time and several gallons of gasoline looking for reading materials that were probably already halfway to Cheyenne. And what about our responsibility to future generations of archaeologists? What about that, Father?

For people like Bonita, and I guarantee your flock is full of them, even the smallest incidence of littering is the greatest evil Men can visit upon the Earth, and no justification exists for it. For me, the cure can sometimes – very rarely, but sometimes – be worse than the disease.

Lord forgive me, Father, but I think I could litter again.

 

It really makes one wonder what kind of house you keep,

When everywhere that you go is your personal garbage heap!